Philippe Starck, the famous designer, is a comedy Frenchman: a little bit Clouseau, a little bit 'Allo 'Allo. He is, he says, a type of new bertle erperneur, a sort of deur to open up our brains. Deur? Ah, deur – the thing you open to get into a reurm.

He's doing this show called Design for Life (BBC2), which is basically The Apprentice – but for young designers instead of business people. London is replaced by Paris, Philippe is Alain Sucre. The winner, chosen from 12 young Brits Eurostarred over for the show, will stay and work for him. They will help Philippe change the world by designing new chairs, in the same way that, with a seung, a zeengeur can shonge zer weurld. It's every young designer's dream.

First, the candidates have to prove that they can think in the right way, that they share Philippe's philosophy and understanding of the world. He sends them to the supermarket Auchan with a simple task: to buy things that represent function, ecology or gender. OK, piss und leurve, he says, as he waves them off.

I think the whole thing will get more interesting when they actually start doing some designing, but for now it's all worth it, just for Philippe. "Ai em nert acteur," he says. "Ai em nert a teacheur, Ai em prerfessional dreameur." You're also bloody hilarious.

The young Brits come back from the supermarket with condoms and tampons to represent male and female; a bicycle is the green object; a battery the environmentally unsound one. There's nothing really wrong with their selections, but their choices are unimaginative, uninspiring, lazy. They've been too narrow-minded about the task, too literal, too English. Philippe is "rilly earnappy", he says. He may be playing the clown, and wearing a comedy red nose, but you can see his earnappiness is genuine. Five have to do the task again, some do better, others don't. For two, the journey ends here.

Philippe's take on the Sir Alan "you're fired" finger is more French, but just as devastating. When he's made up his mind, he gives a little Gallic shrug: pfff. Then he kisses them, once on each cheek. This is the kiss of death, because next thing they know, they're back on the Eurostar heading north, the dream over. Stupid English peeg dergs. Philippe doesn't actually say this, but that's what he's thinking, for sure.

Daredevils: The Human Bird (Channel 4) is a film about a man who does something so astonishingly frightening it's hard to even think about it without a little shiver. And the man, an American called Jeb Corliss, is as fascinating as what he does, with his difficult childhood and that same intense and awkward relationship with society that these death-wish dudes always seem to have. You see it in extreme rock-climbers, too.

Jeb's thing is something called wingsuit proximity flying, which means jumping off a cliff, or out of a helicopter, wearing a kind of Batman suit, then flying, very quickly, back down to earth, before pulling a parachute at the last minute. The batman suit has some sort of wings under the arms and a tail between the legs, so it's really as close to being a bird as is possible. We're not talking graceful, soaring condor, though – it's more like a diving peregrine falcon, plummeting earthwards at terrifying speed.

You'd think that would be thrilling enough, but Jeb only gets a proper kick out of it if he flies almost within touching distance of very large, very hard objects – cliffs, bridges, the big Christ above Rio de Janeiro, and now, in this programme, the Matterhorn. So he dives out of a helicopter above the famous Alp, even though his hand is broken from a training accident a few days before, and he flies in towards the mountain at over 100mph. Is he going to hit the ridge? Up a bit, higher Jeb, quick . . . he clears the ridge by inches, turns and bank steeply. And then he comes back to the ridge and flies down along and just above it, twisting and turning between the rocky outcrops and pinnacles as he goes down. I think it's the most extraordinary, the most terrifying, thing I've ever seen.